The thing that bothered me all these years about Bin Laden was the burial at sea. There's no way that a properly run military mission would do that. There would be video, pictures, samples, there would be all kinds of PAPERWORK, and so forth. Some guy on a ship doesn't get to decide they'll just dump the body overboard. Particularly if its some kind of super freakin' spy mission with super duper stealth aircraft and super secret military assets that Mere Humans are not allowed to know.

But they might if the whole thing was a scummy assassination, which happened because some greedy Pakistani official dropped a dime and made a call to the CIA. Meaning it was NOT the result of using NSA phone intercepts, space based imaging and Super Secret Science to track some vast web of subtle terrorists and beard the lion in his very lair. It was shooting a crippled old geezer in a jail cell and then waiting around for a ride home.

But on the other hand the whole Hersh thing -could- be bullshit. Therefore I go with Occam's Razor, least complicated explanation wins. The least complicated explanation is Hersh is right, and Obama was lying his ass off to look good on TV, because Obama does that pretty much exclusively. If he came out and said the plain Truth about something his freakin' tongue would probably burst into flame.

The decision to keep secret the National Security Agency's collection of American calling records was a strategic blunder that set the stage for Edward Snowden's unauthorized disclosures and ultimately harmed U.S. national security, the agency's former inspector general told NSA employees in blunt remarks Friday.

"You now live in a glass house," Joel Brenner, NSA inspector general from 2002 to 2006, said in a speech marking the 40th anniversary of the congressional hearings into the intelligence scandals of the Watergate era. "How could anyone think the bulk collection program would remain secret?"

It's not that there no longer can be national security secrets, said Brenner, a lawyer who retired in 2009 after serving as the top U.S. counterintelligence official. But "the idea that the broad rules governing your activities -not specific operations, but the broad rules-can be kept secret is a delusion. And they should not be kept secret."

When stated in this way, it does seem idiotic. It seems doubly idiotic to me because WE KNOW ABOUT IT a long time before Snowden came out with his "bombshell". Cops have been using telephone records to catch people since the 1970's, how was there not a national level program to collect that stuff? We knew about the FBI's Carnivore, there's been a Wikipedia page about it since 2004. All Snowden did was make it impossible to ignore any longer.

Let's connect these two dots then, shall we? Item one, Bin Laden was not found using Item two, the trillion dollar non-secret all-encompassing ubiquitous surveillance system that is the NSA. The NSA was pretty much on the sidelines and has been since probably the 1990's, because every crook and scumbag in the entire world knows the NSA is listening to their calls. This would include POLITICIANS, who I'm entirely certain do all their dirty or off-colour dealings face to face with a handshake.

Well, except the stupid ones or the truly arrogant like Hillary Clinton. The speed with which General Petraeus' emails to Paula Broadwell were revealed says much about the power of the NSA to find things. The NSA has copies of ALL those emails Hillary deleted off that private server. She just doesn't care because she's so Important no little clerk would dare disturb her by "finding" them. Note that all of official Washington is pretending its all over now, no hope of ever getting those emails back, nuh uh.

So what's the NSA for then? Is it for overthrowing the US Constitution and starting a New Empire like frickin' Star Wars?

Does it seem like the bunch of sad-sacks portrayed in Seymour Hersh's piece could dream of pulling something like that off? Does it seem like an Edward Snowden wouldn't squeal on them if they did?

No. If we connect all this shit up, it seems very likely that the NSA isn't FOR anything at all. It just grew, and grew, and grew until it was what we see today. The titanic, all-encompassing and entirely useless-for-security Peeping Tom to end all Peeping Toms. It staggers along under its own weight, soaking up money like a sponge and rewarding all sorts of cronies and faithful servants. Its like a Golden Calf, it doesn't do anything useful but it has its worshipers all the same.

We know from Mr. Snowden that many of the little dickless hipsters who work there use the system to collect amateur porn pics and video as young women take pictures of themselves with their phones. Cops do the same thing in LA, two of them got busted for it lately.

2 comments:

Alyric
said...

Don't forget that your hypothetical NSA cleric is uniquely positioned to understand that if they leaked information on the Clintons, that afterward they'd feel so guilty about it that they'd commit suicide by shooting themselves in the back of the head.